Summary
Forty-five years after George Miller first sent us down the highway of his dystopian vision, he shows few signs of slowing down.
When Mad Max: Fury Road came roaring back onto screens in 2015, it reminded us of two very important things. First and foremost, George Miller’s power as a visual storyteller was accelerating. That, and Australia has long been the perfect backdrop for a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Watching FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA at the premiere in early May at the magnificent State Theatre in Sydney, that local connection was tangible. From the presence of the cast and crew, including Chris Hemsworth in his first local film to date, through to cheers as familiar names and faces appeared on screen, it was a screening that arguably disproved the tall poppy syndrome we in the Antipodes wear like a badge of honour. Shot in the NSW towns of Hay and Silverton, it’s been almost four decades since Mad Max has felt quite this home grown.
Set several decades before the events of Fury Road, young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is taken by a Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus (Hemsworth). Growing up in this harsh environment, she is soon embroiled at the centre of a war for a citadel run by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).
The difficulty faced by all prequels is that we already know how it all turns out. Charlize Theron’s Furiosa arrived on screens as a fully-formed character, eclipsing even Tom Hardy’s tortured soul on screen. (Indeed, Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris had extensively scripted Furiosa’s backstory for Theron to draw on). Yet this is George Miller and there’s very little chance that you won’t feel the burn of his pacing or go over old ground – even over the course of 148 minutes.
Stylistically matching much of Miller’s previous series entry, the first shock comes with the sheer amount of green we see in the ‘place of abundance’ glimpsed in the opening act of this film. The rest of the movie is split into booklike chapters, running us up and down the Fury Road in, hanging off or crashing into a giant chrome-plated war machine. While arguably not quite as gobsmacking as it was almost a decade ago, it’s nevertheless filled with so many cataclysmically impressive set-pieces that it scarcely matters if any of it makes complete sense.
Taylor-Joy slips into this world with seemingly effortless grace, allowing audiences to combine her performance with Theron’s in our head-canon. Hemsworth is clearly having a ball playing a decidedly non-heroic type, almost as if the prosthetic nose he sports was all the excuse he needed to let his freak flag fly.
In many ways, FURIOSA feels like an extended appendix to Fury Road, especially given that Miller ends this by leading us by the hand into the story’s ‘sequel.’ So, did we need this story? From a narrative perspective, perhaps not. Yet as fans of high-octane movies, we greedily accept this meaty specimen of action fun, especially in a cinematic landscape that occasionally feels as barren as a post-apocalyptic Australia.
2024 | Australia, USA | DIRECTOR: George Miller | WRITERS: George Miller, Nico Lathouris | CAST: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, Lachy Hulme | DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Pictures (Australia) | RUNNING TIME: 148 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 23 May 2024 (Australia), 24 May 2024 (USA)
